Slippery Creatures

by KJ Charles

  Price’s jaw firmed. “Hand it to me, and I’ll let you go.”

  “He won’t,” Kim told Will savagely. “You could identify him. And when he shoots you, you’ll deserve it.”

  “I’ve been shot at plenty of times,” Will said. “Never had much thanks for it. I’ll leave you to your business, Price, if you’ll leave me to mine. Do we have an agreement?”

  Price nodded firmly. “Give it to me and you will walk out of here unharmed. You won’t hear from me, or my people, again. Your safety is guaranteed, my word on it.”

  Their eyes locked. “Your word,” Will said at last. “Fine.”

  “Then get up. But don’t play the fool,” Price warned.

  “I’m not planning to.” Will flicked a thumb at Libra. “If he shoots me, you’ll never have it.”

  “He won’t,” Price said. Libra’s mouth moved silently.

  Will got up carefully, no sudden movements, and went to the bookshelves that lined the wall. Behind him, Kim inhaled audibly.

  “Keep them covered,” Price told Libra, for all the world as though he was the boss now. He came close to Will, breathing hard.

  Will turned to scan the room. Libra was dividing his attention, flicking his gaze from Kim and Ingoldsby to Will. Ingoldsby was watching Price, the skin stretched tight over his angular features. Kim was watching Libra.

  Will pulled out The Book of British Birds but didn’t open it. He turned to the room. Every set of eyes was on him now except Kim’s.

  “Here we are,” he said, and opened the book wide to reveal a paper covered in spidery handwriting. Price made a noise in his throat and reached out for it.

  Will tossed the heavy book into his face, caught the wrist of his gun hand, and wrenched it sharply upwards. Price yelled, and the revolver went off, shockingly loud in the enclosed space, along with a flurry of movement and crashing behind them. Price grabbed at Will’s wrist with his other hand, trying to free his arm, leaving his torso entirely exposed.

  Will pulled the Messer from under his coat and struck upward. The blade slid into Price’s ribcage like butter. He took the revolver from Price’s suddenly limp hand, shoved him away, and swung to face the room as Price slumped to the ground.

  Kim and Ingoldsby had got Libra on the floor. He still held his gun, though at least Ingoldsby was holding his outstretched arm down, and he was thrashing and fighting like a wild beast, bucking under Kim’s weight, careless of the arm twisted behind his back.

  Desperation was always dangerous. Will walked over and gave Kim Price’s revolver. “You might want this.”

  “Thanks.” Kim took the gun, and jammed it into the back of Libra’s neck. “I really would enjoy shooting you. Give me an excuse.”

  Libra roared and flailed. “Take the damned gun off him!” Kim snapped.

  “Trying!” Ingoldsby snarled back.

  Will went over, put a foot on Libra’s wrist, and applied his considerable body weight, forcing the edge of his heel into flesh and bone till Libra’s fingers convulsed. He scooped up the gun. “Got it.”

  Ingoldsby leapt to his feet. “Price!”

  Libra took the chance to try and buck Kim off. Kim ground the revolver into his neck with an exasperated noise. “Get me something to tie him with, would you, Will? A dressing gown cord should do it. Back of my bedroom door. The red one, please, not the purple velvet.”

  Ingoldsby gave a snort of disgust. “Call a doctor first. And get me a towel. This man’s bleeding to death.”

  “When are your blasted neighbours turning up?” Will enquired of Kim.

  “Twelfth of never. You could fire a Maxim gun in here without adverse comment. The chap at number twelve once brought a pig in.”

  This seemed to annoy Libra. Will left Kim to manage that while he went to the bathroom, grabbed a towel, and tossed it in Ingoldsby’s direction. He picked up the phone and asked the operator to summon an ambulance. Then he went to get the cord.

  “The red one, Will,” Kim said again as he left the room.

  Kim’s bedroom was much as he remembered it, all warm lamps and luxury, except that the bed was neatly made and it didn’t smell of sex and male sweat. It should have. Will paused at the door where Kim had stood that Monday morning, asking to part on good terms. He remembered the way Kim fucked, the noises he made, the need and pleasure and wariness in his eyes.

  He didn’t want to look for what he’d come to get now. He didn’t want another false hope; he didn’t want to be wrong. His heart thumped unpleasantly, in a way it hadn’t when he’d been readying himself to kill.

  Deep breath, in and out.

  Kim’s purple bathrobe was hanging on top of the other. Will moved it aside, put his hand into the pocket of the red one, and touched folded paper. He pulled it out, and there it was. Two pages of Shakespeare, scribbled on in Draven’s familiar hand.

  Will leaned against the door, pressing his face against the smooth purple velvet that smelled like Kim. He let himself do nothing but feel for a moment, a chaos of hurt and gratitude, anger and deep, profound relief. Then he pocketed the papers, extracted the red cord from its loops, and went back out.

  In the sitting room, Ingoldsby knelt over Price, pressing the towel to his abdomen. It was soaked with blood. Kim still had Libra prone, one arm twisted behind his back, revolver pressed into his neck. Will dropped the red cord onto Libra’s back.

  Kim’s dark eyes met Will’s in a silent moment before he spoke. “Can you tie him for me? As you see, my hands are occupied.”

  “So they are,” Will said. He pulled out the papers, walked to the gas fire, and thrust them into the grate.

  “What the— Darling!” Ingoldsby bellowed. “What are you doing?”

  Libra turned his head, saw what was happening, and thrashed wildly. This time he caught Kim napping. Kim went over sideway, dropping the gun, which skittered across the floor; Libra leapt to his feet and ran for the door.

  “Ingoldsby, stop him!” Kim bellowed.

  “This man’s bleeding to death!”

  Kim clambered to his feet as Libra’s footsteps rapidly retreated, and turned on Will, who held up the Messer warningly. They stared at one another as the papers flamed in Will’s hand.

  “Get those damned papers off him!” Ingoldsby called out.

  “You do it,” Kim said. “I don’t like that knife.”

  The pages were down to a couple of inches, starting to heat his fingers. Will dropped them into the grate, where the unburned paper caught instantly and fell as a flaming mass onto the tiled hearth.

  Kim stamped on the remnants, then stooped to check and made an exasperated noise. “It’s gone. All burned. That’s rendered a great deal of hard work entirely pointless.”

  “You found your leak,” Will said. “And Zodiac didn’t get the information. Two out of three’s not bad. Shame you let Libra go, though.”

  Kim started to reply to that in uncomplimentary terms as Ingoldsby’s voice rose furiously. Will ignored them both. He found a cloth to clean his knife, and took a seat, waiting to find out what would happen next.

  Medics—doctors, rather—came and removed Price. Ingoldsby spoke angrily, near rather than at Will. There was a certain amount of discussion in low voices, but nobody seemed inclined to arrest him. So he went home.

  He was a bit nervous about encountering Libra on the way. He hadn’t expected Kim to let the man go. Probably he had his reasons for doing so: Will didn’t know what they were, and didn’t care. If he found Libra lurking at the bookshop bent on vengeance, he’d use the Messer again.

  Libra wasn’t there. The shop was cold and dusty, but it was safe, and Will had a fine night’s sleep in his rickety bed.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Will put his back into work the next day, sorting and tidying as best he could. He started to clear space in one of the upstairs rooms in the hope of one day making it a proper living space. He dropped round to see Maisie at lunchtime and agreed a date to take her out for dinner and the ful
l explanation she made it clear he owed her, and went back to do more work.

  Nobody official came to interview him. Presumably Ingoldsby was putting a lid on the events around Price’s treachery, or perhaps there was a storm brewing and about to break. Will just worked through the day, and the next one. Working, planning, thinking, waiting.

  Kim turned up on the third evening.

  Will had closed up and pulled the blinds against the dark by then. He could only see a silhouette at the door, but Kim’s outline was imprinted on his mind now. He went to the newly mended door to let him in.

  “Hello,” Kim said, slipping inside. “I thought we should speak.”

  “I dare say.” Will went to his desk and indicated the spare chair. Kim hovered a moment, then took it.

  “So what’s new?” Will asked, when he seemed unwilling to start.

  “Price has died.” Kim spoke neutrally, watching his face.

  Will nodded. “I should expect the police, then?”

  “No, you shouldn’t. It’s being handled internally, as they like to say. Ingoldsby agrees you acted with impressive initiative in a difficult situation—I quote him directly—and more to the point, nobody from the WO wants you standing in a public dock, explaining that Price was engaged in ongoing treason. The matter will be dealt with at Horse Guards Parade, and the family given a story.”

  “So much for Price?”

  “No flowers by request,” Kim agreed. “So you needn’t worry about official repercussions. His demise is generally agreed to be for the best, in the circumstances. Of course, it’s a shame he expired without regaining consciousness because a number of people had questions for him, but you can hardly be blamed for that. Except in a very literal sense, of course.” He paused. “I’m not sure if I should offer reassurances.”

  “What about?”

  “You killed him. Do you need to hear that you had to do it?”

  “I know I had to do it: that was why I did it. I don’t stab people by accident.”

  “Indeed not,” Kim said. “And I couldn’t see another way out, so I’m glad to hear you aren’t racked by remorse. Can I take a moment to applaud your speed on the uptake, by the way? A flawlessly executed divide-and-conquer strategy.”

  “Well, you told me everything I needed,” Will pointed out. “Let’s call it a pincer movement.”

  There was a glimmer of a smile on Kim’s lips. “You enjoyed it, didn’t you?”

  Will grimaced. He’d shared a trench for a while with a senior lecturer in mathematics who insisted that equations could be beautiful. Will’s school experience of algebra didn’t support that in the slightest, but he’d sometimes had a vague inkling of what the fellow meant. When you lost yourself in work; when you could operate in perfect harmony with someone; when you had that soaring sense of everything clicking into place and the world running on well-oiled tracks, however briefly.

  Kim gave him that, so Will said what he would not have done to anyone else. “Yes. I did.”

  “And yet the Army let you go, the damned fools. Talking of which, you should know that Libra—his name was Martin McLean—is even now practising scales alongside Price in the choir invisible. He was pulled out of the river yesterday.”

  Will whistled. “Zodiac?”

  “Undoubtedly. They don’t like mistakes, and wasting an asset like Price with nothing to show for it was the last straw. McLean looked like they had made that point to him, over some hours.”

  Will studied his face. “Did you know that would happen? Is that why you let him go?”

  “I let him go so he could report that the information had been burned, in order to get Zodiac off your back. The rest was incidental.”

  “But you knew they’d get him.”

  Kim shrugged. “He lost any claim to mercy when he chained you up like a dog.”

  And he’d promised to have Libra’s balls for that, and now Libra was dead, and Will was, perhaps, safe. He nodded. “So Draven’s horror is gone, Zodiac know it, and the War Office is covering up. Does that mean it’s all over? At least, over for me?”

  “I think so. Zodiac has sustained a heavy loss, and their very sensible habit is to regroup, not to throw good money after bad. Ingoldsby—well, he’s not happy about you burning the papers, but he has other things to occupy him. He recommended Price for promotion twice, you know. Thought of him as a son.”

  “Poor sod,” Will said, with an unexpected surge of sympathy.

  “You think so?”

  “It’s not much fun to trust someone and then find out they’ve played you for a fool.”

  The words hung in the air. “No,” Kim said after a moment. “Indeed.”

  “You stole that ticket in front of me while I was chained up. That was shitty.”

  “It was, yes.”

  “I really don’t understand,” Will said. “You’re better than that. You’re clever and brave and determined. You ought to be a man whose family are proud of him, with friends who trust him. Why aren’t you?”

  “Your ability to inflict damage with words as well as knives is noted. Can we agree I behaved appallingly and get on to the part where I apologise and remove myself from your presence?”

  “Not yet. You stole the ticket from me, but first you spent six days searching for me. Was that just in the hope of finding the information?”

  Kim shut his eyes. “Will...”

  “I want the truth. I deserve the truth.”

  “Yes, you do.” Kim’s face was blank, but his knuckles were white. “I...was not looking for the information, no. I came after you because I couldn’t do otherwise. Knowing they had you—that if I had done better, you could have trusted me, and we might have worked together—I had to find you. And if I hadn’t managed it...” He stopped there.

  “What?” Will demanded.

  “I’d have burned Zodiac to the ground,” Kim said simply. “However long it took. Whatever it cost.”

  Will breathed out, feeling a band loosen around his lungs. “But you still took the ticket, for all that.”

  “Of course I did. I had you safe and well, or approximately so, and it fell into my lap. An unexpected bonus.” There was a nasty twist in his voice on that last.

  “You took it off me and got the information and used it, and then you told me where the pages were. You stole them from me, and you gave them back. Why?”

  “Because they should have been destroyed, and nobody else had the balls to do it. Not your uncle, not Draven, and certainly not me. I’m glad you did. Some other soulless bastard who looks at humanity through a lens will doubtless come up with a similar evil in due course, but I don’t have to facilitate it. I should have reached that conclusion a long time ago.”

  “Yes, you should.”

  “In fairness, it was also rather urgent to find the leak,” Kim added. “I needed the information to dangle as bait, force Libra’s hand while he was desperate. I could have told you that, of course, and asked you to trust me with the information. I didn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you’d have said no, of course.”

  “Christ, you’re trying,” Will said. “Hold on. Is that why you wouldn’t let me kill Libra before? Because you wanted to use him to get at the leak? Not that stuff about ‘you’re not a murderer’?”

  Kim rolled his eyes. “Oh, please. You know who you are, and you wear it well. I really don’t know why you listen to me.”

  “Nor do I, you corkscrew-tongued bastard. Jesus wept. You could open wine bottles with that.”

  “I do my best.” Kim’s eyebrow flickered suggestively, then he made a face, as if recalling himself. “Anyway, there you are. Finding the information was not my priority, but when it fell into my lap, I took advantage. Is that what you needed to know?”

  “As far as it goes, but I’ve another question and I want a straight answer, with no dancing around. You owe me that.”

  Kim’s face tensed, but he nodded. Will said, “All right. Did you f
uck me under orders?”

  He might as well have struck the man. Kim’s nostrils flared. “What a remarkable fist I have made of my life, that it is quite reasonable for you to ask me that.”

  “I need to know. Did you do it because you were told to? Or to get me to trust you? Or—” He could see it hurt and he didn’t care. He couldn’t let Kim off this hook. “To have something on me?”

  “Christ. No, Will. None of that.” He paused, then shut his eyes again. “Or, at least, not the first time. I can safely say that my professional judgement didn’t come into it at any point that night: it was just me and you. But when you came to my flat for that bath—granted I brought you there because I wanted you there, but once I’d guessed what Draven had done with the information, I decided to keep you there by fair means or foul. I am aware that was contemptible. I knew it at the time.”

  “Would you have gone through with it?”

  “I don’t know. Probably. Or perhaps not. I don’t know. I can’t say I was looking forward to the prospect. I fucked for professional reasons a few years ago—as a matter of national necessity, I mean, not the other profession. It did my self-esteem no good at all, and that was a man I had no moral qualms about deceiving. And yet, when the opportunity arose, I fully intended to do it to you. So there you are.”

  “You’re a bit of a mess, aren’t you?”

  “My friend, you have no idea.”

  Will ran his hands through his hair. “I did some thinking. All the blowing hot and cold, all the times you said no. You were trying not to fuck under false pretences, weren’t you? You stole from me when I was at my weakest, but you wouldn’t share a bed at Nanny’s house once you’d done it. I don’t understand you.”

  “I didn’t enjoy betraying you. I did it, repeatedly, but it’s really not a hobby. And I didn’t want to fuck under false pretences because...” He exhaled. “Because I wanted so much to do it under real ones.”

  Will wasn’t sure how to respond to that. Kim managed a smile. It wasn’t a marvellous smile, but he managed it, and even met Will’s eyes. “I like you, Will, enormously. Your certainty and courage. I don’t know anyone with whom I’d rather execute an ambush in a muddy field.”